The classic novel finds new life on the silver screen
By Susan Hornik
Fresh off her role as Bella, human turned vampire in the Twilight series, actress Kristen Stewart takes off on a completely different journey, as the free-spirited Marylou in On the Road, Walter Salles’ film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s biographical novel. The widely read book follows a group of young friends on a spiritual quest for meaning amidst the conformity and conservatism of the 1950s. Throughout their cross-country travels they seek personal fulfillment and enlightenment through the juxtaposition of the worldly and the holy: Buddhism, poetry, jazz, sex and drugs.
Kerouac’s own background was steeped in Catholicism. He’d had a vision in a Catholic church in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1954, in which he began to perceive that “beat” really meant “beatific,” as in spiritual transcendence. In On the Road, published three years later, he portrayed Dean Moriarty, modeled on his writer friend Neal Cassady, as both beat and beatific, but over the years the secular aspect of his writing has taken precedence over the spiritual.
Thomas Bierowski, author of Kerouac in Ecstasy: Shamanic Expression in the Writings, told bctv.org, “Most readers/critics either give short shrift to the serious spiritual content of Kerouac’s novels or overlook it altogether because, I don’t know, he had a lot of bad habits, or wasn’t a good pious person or something. Do you gotta be ‘good’ to be spiritual? Would that it were so simple. Old Jack was a serious Catholic and a serious Buddhist.”
Finding the Path
The re-telling of the “search for meaning” still seems relevant to young people today, Stewart told WLT. “I definitely relate to those characters,” she said, “they never stopped pushing themselves and each other to find the answers they were looking for. I was 15 years old when I read that book, and it changed me.”
Castmate Garrett Hedlund was a great fan of Kerouac’s work too, and thrilled to be cast in the part of Dean Moriarty. “I was in disbelief that something like this would come my way. Most of the things
we are in search of, we rarely find,” he said.
Seekers today incorporate new technology and find their own unique approaches, yet continue to follow many of the now-well-trod paths of the Beats. They explore spirituality and personal growth, but also dabble in sex, drugs and nonconforming personal appearance.
“There are always going to be outsiders who don’t feel that way once they find other outsiders,” Stewart said. “And there are always going to be people who have different expectations of what their lives should be, and different lines that they follow. When you find a commonality in that, you can see how far you can take it.”
Seekers tend to be what we think of as “old souls,” and although only 22, Stewart has an old-soul, introspective quality. She also realizes the rarity of a Hollywood film about spirituality and meaning. “People are afraid of doing anything unless there’s an equation you can rely on that’s been successful in the past,” she said. “It’s really rare for somebody to have faith in the material or the courage to actually go after something they don’t know for certain that audiences are going to connect with on a grand scale. I find that it’s a miracle when a group comes together that shares the same energy about a project … you know that you are driven by the same things.”
The Heart of the Beats
In preparation for filming, director Salles created a “beatnik camp,” immersing the cast in old photographs and books and letters by Kerouac, Cassady and poet Allen Ginsberg. “The idea was to create a community before we began creating the film,” he explained. “Barry Gifford, who has written extensively about Kerouac and On The Road, came to the camp to talk to us about the book and characters. Gifford had interviewed Lu Anne Henderson, the Marylou character played by Stewart (Cassady’s first marriage to 15-year-old Henderson was annulled), and the recordings he made were a big help to Kristen.” The actress also spoke extensively with Henderson’s daughter.
The real Lu Anne was a free-spirited, very sexual woman for her time. “People talk about the women in the story being sort of a peripheral storyline, and they can be difficult to understand if you don’t know really know what’s going on in their hearts,” Stewart said. After listening to the recordings, the actress came to perceive her character as a feminist who enjoyed exploring sexual taboos. “I think she would have been very well ahead of her time now as well,” she added. “She never felt like she wanted to limit anyone else’s life because she loved their life so much. She really was an absolutely fantastic person.”
Neal Cassady’s son (with second wife Carolyn Robinson) also had something valuable to contribute. “When John came to see us,” Salles said, “he communicated something fundamental: On The Road is not a story about the Beat Generation. It’s an epic novel about young men [and women] 18, 20 years old, who don’t know they’re causing a revolution right at the moment they’re doing it. It’s the moment before the eruption, the lava forming and boiling under the surface, about to emerge.” Indeed, they were the leading edge of a search for meaning that now dominates much of American culture, certainly among youth.
“I felt a strong affinity to the Beat Generation,” Salles remembered. “I was a teenager in the late 1960s and early ’70s; for people of my generation, it wasn’t difficult to understand that most of the liberation movements sweeping our consciousness had their roots in the generation of [writers] Ginsberg, Kerouac, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka. They had quite simply redefined the way we were living, or the way we wanted to live.
“Poet Michael McClure, who was part of the movement, expresses it more clearly than I: ‘The other day, a young guy about 21 asked me what happened to the Beat Generation. He dressed the way he wanted, wore his hair the way he wanted, was against the war in Iraq and interested in ecology and Buddhism. I asked him the same question: ‘Yes, where is the Beat Generation?’ It was in him. Sometimes it isn’t easy to explain that to people.”
“All these writers in this era seemed like lost loons,” added Garrett Hedlund, “but they sure did find the pearl of what they were looking for. And they achieved far more than they thought possible.”
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